Over the weekend my Outlook categories have disappeared from the Categories list. How do I get them back?

Our categories have vanished overnight.

We use the web version of outlook.

Like everyone else on this thread, this is having a major impact on our business. We have over 2,500 clients in our business address book, and used over 350 different categories based on job title, industry, seniority, location, etc, etc.

Oddly, when I view a contact, I can see the categories on their record, but the actual category list, and the ability categorise new contacts, has vanished.

To come into the office this morning and have all that info wiped out has caused us a system critical failure on an epic scale.

I need those categories back. Microsoft, are you listening? We need your help with this.

We have tried clearing cookies and cache, thinking maybe it was a localised issue with the Edge browser. That did not help.

When we click into Settings > General > Categories there are just thirteen left, out of over 350 carefully crafted and well thought out categories.

How are we supposed to recreate that? It'll take months.

I am having this issue as well. Around the same time too actually... I can't pinpoint it to a date, but my categories are just gone now, within the week. I can't remember them all, so it would be nice to somehow get them back.

It's a total nightmare.

When categories launched, we went through an intensive, ten month project to categorise thousands of contacts by industry, level of seniority and job title.

I feel like a fool, because we soon came to rely so much on those categories to be able to reach out to suppliers and clients, and now that the data is no longer there, we're really struggling.

I've had a few emails from Microsoft support, and they tell me they've escalated this to a tech team, but I've not heard back. I guess we small businesses just don't mean enough to Microsoft to support us properly.

I thought I found a fix late lest week...if you click on a contact, you can see their categories on the contact card...if you make any amendment to their details (even just put a single letter in the notes section) and click save, their categories return to the left search column, and they work! You can click on them and any other contacts with the same category will appear.

Happy Days!!!!

And then it fell apart.

When you refresh the page or close the outlook app, the list defaults back to having 5-10 categories.

Also, even if you don't refresh and decide to try and keep the app (or tab, if you're using outlook web) open and keep the categories in the column, if you create a new contact, the full list of categories does not appear, so you still cannot categorise new contacts.

To re-iterate, Microsoft, this is a total nightmare. We need those categories to be able to do our jobs properly.

As much short term pain it would cause to switch to the Google business suite, for the first time in twenty years, I'm seriously looking into it.

This has also happened to me recently as well

Hi Tania,

They have started to roll out a fix, but it's not 100% sorted out yet.

As of the 03rd September, about half of our categories reappeared and are working as normal.

The other half are still missing.

Unfortunately, the Microsoft representative closed my case when I reported that some of our categories had returned, and is no longer responding to emails, so I'm going to have to open a new case to get any further updates.

As best as I can tell, the bug seems to have been widespread and, now that they've found a solution, it's going to take them a while to roll it out.

I'll post here if/when I get an update from Microsoft.